Unschooling, because Homeschooling was too much work.

[Slacker]

This would be a great way to educate your children if it was done alongside a formal education. Which is why any school system worth the name will already incorporate as much practical examples and hands-on experience as possible.

I don't know about you, but that was pretty much what I had in addition to going to school. My mother's a teacher, so she did all sorts of crap like that while my sister and I grew up during the summers and weekends. As the only method of education? Not-uh. Nice supplement, though.

[aerius]

If the school district would involve rote memorization in an understaffed, overstudented classroom with no one-on-one teacher-student time, we could probably do a better job buying curricula and lab materials and learning the material a little bit ahead of the kids.

I had a couple teachers in high school do this, because of retirements we were down a computers teacher and a science teacher and for whatever reason they weren't replaced. So we had an electronics & math teacher, respectively, teach those classes and they were learning the material themselves only a little bit ahead of the class. The science class went fairly well, the computers class was a complete clusterfuck.

[Simon_Jester]

There's also the question of how the education our children would receive in the local school district would compare to the education we could give them. If the school district would involve rote memorization in an understaffed, overstudented classroom with no one-on-one teacher-student time, we could probably do a better job buying curricula and lab materials and learning the material a little bit ahead of the kids.

This was a big part of what I was talking about. With parents at the upper end of the scale in terms of intelligence, education, and teaching ability, a homeschooled child might have some holes or weak points in their education in topics the parents don't know... but a lot of the children who go to ordinary schools have holes or weak points in their education anyway, especially if the local schools aren't very good.

[Darth Wong]

As far as social skills go, homeschoolers rarely work in a vacuum. Generally, they network and cooperate to maximize their collective resources - for instance, Rachel teaches several classes, in Latin, history, and debate, to homeschoolers from many different families.

It's not just "social skills". It's also heterogeneous social exposure. Public schools expose children to a widely varying group of people of various backgrounds and attitudes, who their parents might not hang around with of their own volition. Can you say the same thing about homeschooling? Even when homeschooler kids get together with other kids, who are they? Other children of homeschoolers. In other words, a homogeneous social environment. That's why it's so popular among fundies who want to raise their kids in an environment of controlled ideology and hatred for outsiders.

[Surlethe]

That's a fair point. I'll have to think on it.

[lazerus]

It's not just "social skills". It's also heterogeneous social exposure. Public schools expose children to a widely varying group of people of various backgrounds and attitudes, who their parents might not hang around with of their own volition. Can you say the same thing about homeschooling? Even when homeschooler kids get together with other kids, who are they? Other children of homeschoolers. In other words, a homogeneous social environment. That's why it's so popular among fundies who want to raise their kids in an environment of controlled ideology and hatred for outsiders.

Speaking as someone who was home schooled, your absolutely right. My parents did it for legitimate academic reasons (and actually did a superb job), but the vast majority of homeschooling organizations around us were useless, as they were either explicitly religious, or just so cloistered in one world view or another that the fact we didn't share it necessarily excluded us.

[Surlethe]

Split Nickolay1's pointless spam and Bluewolf's unhelpful moderating to the HoS.

[Bluewolf]

Speaking as someone who was home schooled, your absolutely right. My parents did it for legitimate academic reasons (and actually did a superb job), but the vast majority of homeschooling organizations around us were useless, as they were either explicitly religious, or just so cloistered in one world view or another that the fact we didn't share it necessarily excluded us.

To be fair, how did your parents do a good job in your view Lazerus? As in, what did they do so well that others did not? It is all well and good to say they did a great job but you gave us no reason as to why. Did they simply make you mingle more or?

[lazerus]

Actually, no. Socially I turned out somewhat odd as a result of homeschooling. I got over it after about a year of college, but lack of socialization is definitely a problem.

I just meant academically, they were able to coordinate a lot of things for subjects they didn't feel qualified to teach. Distance learning courses, classes at the local community college -- we basically had a shelf that was nothing but PBS documentaries, among textbooks on the subject. The only thing they taught me themselves per'se was algebra and geometry, for which they did a fair amount of research themselves to make sure they understood it completely before teaching it to me.